Short?
96 Damon Intruder 30 amp. I’m not at the campground today, but they called and said my RV had a short in it and was effecting another pedestal. They unplugged my RV. Said it was probably power cord....
Forum Discussion
Acampingwewillgo wrote:
Interesting only because a couple years back I had purchased one of those Voltage/Polarity plug in testers(the common RV one with the alarm). So here I was at an older campsite, 30 amp power and my Polarity Alarm goes off. Before I panic, I go out to the pedestal and use my rather large homemade pedestal checker...it also shows a polarity problem. Ummm...so I call the Ranger, they send someone over to check the pedestal. Of course they have fewer tools than I do but he relates how the pedestals are piggybacked.
Rather than drawing this out any further, just as soon as a suspect Motorhome left a site two away from me, as soon as he unplugged, the polarity problem went away. The next person who pulled into that site, plugged in and still we had recurring no issue.
More than likely, you had a poor or completely bad ground wire connection upstream of the "problem" motorhome in the campground wiring. For whatever reason (possibly an electrical problem in that motorhome), the ground was being pulled to hot. While the symptoms went away when the motorhome left, the underlying fault in the campground electrical system did not and the safety ground was still compromised.
Those testers, and the EMS units, are not capable of actually detecting reverse polarity, open ground, etc. in isolation; all they do is measure the relative voltages between the various wires. If there is zero volts (or practically zero volts) between neutral and ground, and 120 between hot and neutral (and of course also hot and ground), all is "good." If there instead is zero volts between hot and ground and 120 between hot and neutral, then it's "reverse polarity," even if the underlying cause is something more subtle. Similarly, "open ground" just means that ground is not bonded to neutral.
